Obama’s 'Never Gonna Give You Up'

Barack Obama "rickrolled".

A video of Barack Obama singing Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” isn’t just funny, it’s part of an Internet prank phenomenon that’s sweeping the online world.

If you don’t already know what "rickrolling" is, then you’ve obviously never fallen victim to it.

The prank is simple. You click on a link you think is something else, but instead you get the video clip of Astley’s 1987 hit. It’s called a “bait and switch” prank, the first of which led unsuspecting surfers to a picture of a duck with wheels.

Rickrolling began on the 4chan site, and it’s estimated that now over 18 million people have fallen victim to the prank.

Various spin-offs have emerged and a quick YouTube search will bring up videos like “I rickrolled my entire school,” “Nazis get rickrolled,” and “Church gets rickrolled.”

But the best yet emerged on Saturday, with a video of carefully edited Obama recordings in which the presidential candidate appears to be singing along to the song.

Five days later, it’s number one on the viral chart, with already 1,091,020 views.

"Mr Burns gets rickrolled"

Posted by "linkin54321" February 28, 2008

"Darth Vader rickrolls"

Posted by “Tokyostormtrooper” July 15, 2008

“Barack Roll”

Posted by Hugh Atkin August 9, 2008.

The creator behind "Barack Roll" is blogger Hugh Atkin from Sydney, Australia. He explains how he edited it.

This thing keeps spreading much further and faster than I would have thought possible. I'd been thinking about doing a Barack Rolling video for a couple of months (...). Luckily, I chanced upon a post about the Elections Video Search gadget on the official Google blog. Essentially, it uses word-recognition software to make political YouTube videos searchable. It's not perfect and it still took a number of days of work, but it's a huge improvement over trawling through debate transcripts."